how could i modify a straight cut paper shredder to cut the paper to certain dimensions?

i want to put A4 paper in landscape and for it to come out cut into 34 pieces (each piece is about 9.5mm)
any help would be greatly appreciated

Comments

[frollard]

Depends, some shredders have the cutter wheels welded to the axle, where others are just dies friction/mechanically locked against each other. Find a shredder, carefully disassemble, and see if you can attach instead of Left Right Left Right (LRLRLRLRLR) rearrange the cutters to be LLRRLLRR or LLLRRRLLLRRR to make wider strips.

If they are locked to each other, you'll need to pretty much start from square one making the cutter heads from scratch.

[Kiteman]

He might be lucky, and grinding off some of the fixed blades might leave him with strips the right size...

_...maybe.

[modaawesome]

yup +1

[tcollins3]

well i have to buy one yet haha
i was just making sure it was do able without exploding it or myself

[jumpfroggy]

I had a lot of trouble finding straight-cut paper shredders for a similar project. I could not find a single one locally.

The old/cheap one that I have still has barbs on the discs, used to munch up credit cards. That means that even if mine were converted to cut strips, those strips would be damaged every 1-2 inches from the barbs. So if you wanted to use 9.5mm strips that were as long as an A4 sheet, they'd all be messed up.

If you can't find a paper shredder to use (which I think may be very hard to find, and even harder to modify), then you could use a guillotine (preferred) or rotary style paper cutter with a guide to force 9.5mm cuts. With a good guide + cutter, you can go very quickly on multiple sheets of paper. I used to cut 1000's of sheets of paper from 8.5 x 11 down to 8.25 square using this method. Could be modified to result in 9.5mm strips, but you'd have to try it out a bit first.

Good luck!

[frollard]

*if its a cheap crappy shredder with 'disc' shaped cutters instead of solid 'die' cutters, then it would be trivial to just cut or grind off the cutters that are in the way to make wider strips.

[modaawesome]

REMOVE ALL THE BLADES EXCEPT THE ONE YOU WANT TO CUT THE PAPER WITH

[blinkyblinky]

First, take apart your shredder carefully. Don't touch any pc boards. You are only interested in the blade. Being very careful, measure out where the blades need to accomodate your dimensions. Remove the blades you don't want (two blades per spot) and throw it all back together again. Theoretically, this should work.

[Burf]

I wanted to make a bunch of approximately 1/2" inch wide strips for a paper mache project, so I removed the cutter wheel assembly from an old shredder and ground down every other cutting wheel on my bench grinder. It took me about an hour and worked perfectly after re-assembly.
Depending on how your particular shredder is designed and the dimensions required, something like that may work for you.